201–210 of 221 posts
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Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.
Hope all your programs are written in machine code. Wouldn’t want to be proud of compiler output.
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That's a better analogy than my dumb drawing one. You can be happy you got your pizza and you can enjoy the taste but it is not an accomplishment to be proud of.
The pizza analogy smuggles in this idea of cheep/mass-produced. I'm talking about blind people who can now prompt their way to an accessibility mod for their favorite game, the sort of thing which literally would have never been written before. How you know it wouldn't've been written is by counting the accessibility mods pre and post LLM. Now generalize this. Every tiny community, every person with a disability, eve…
You can feel happy about the result, you can find the house useful, but you shouldn't feel a sense of building accomplishment, because you didn't build anything.
With AI & apps there's less friction, because you don't even have to hire another human being, it's just prompting. In that sense, it's definitely closer to ordering food from an app.
In any case, in the context of TFA, there's also a sense of low quality, cheaply made. The bots making the PRs aren't reading the contribution guidelines, so that's low quality all by itself. Drowning a human reviewer with a mass of PR is also a low quality way of contributing.
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Sure, you can feel proud of whatever you wish. But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel similarly proud of what you did.
lol, you’re literally talking about non-coders that GGGP said they know. No one is sharing their AI stuff here asking you to be impressed.
That actually happens all the time on Show HN these days.
The PR quality problem is legit and needs a solution. But saying his opinion hasn’t changed on this: “the main and most important reason why GenAI tools do not work for me is that they do not make me any faster.” It’s been a year and agents and models have improved dramatically. I can see for some things it doesn’t make sense, but not using it at all because there’s nothing it can help with? Devs who don’t use models…
It's been years of AI advocates saying that. It has never yet been true, and it isn't true today either.
This reminds me way back when you would see "Website written in Notepad" on websites.
I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…
I'm not a big fan of his generally, but I highly recommend this book in particular. A lot of what he wrote there really resonated for me.
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I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts. It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.
As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.
I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party."
If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then ctrl-v twice, it is?
To respond to the ending of this piece, I think open source still matters because LLMs generate very specific code for a specific situation. Quality libraries mean solutions can be reliably shared between projects.
But how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones? How do you even discover up quality libraries if you are leaving so many code decisions to LLMs? Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code without your attribution and without directing people back to your library (and your very human interests in funding development on it or gettin…
Reputation. LLM libraries can also be high quality in theory. It's the level of effort, duration of use, stability, and test coverage. People will need to resist using LLMs to make huge transformations of their libraries all the time to avoid erasing their reputations unless they have convincing safeguards like comprehensive tests or formal proofs that are not touched.
> Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code
Those copies are not reliable like a callsite. Maybe there is less advertising... but it is still better to use the library. I have to hope that at some point AI psychosis will end and engineering, which has not changed, will remain. You have to have reliable inputs to your processes. To do otherwise is insanity.
> getting copyleft contributions back to it
This is a hard question. That said, for my own libraries, I get very few contributions but people use the libraries! The more "hardcore" the library is, the higher the ratio of users to contributors because they're just not expert enough to contribute meaningfully (until your stuff becomes so valuable companies sponsor teams of contributors as in Linux).
That said, my libraries seem to have made it into the weights, so when I talk to LLMs about my problem space they shockingly frequently recommend my own libraries to me (which is kind of ego stroking not gonna lie).
I think there's a lot of reasons to feel demotivated right now, but my perhaps privileged attitude (since I don't have bosses forcing me to use AI for everything) is to use AI where appropriate and apply engineering discipline and thinking in all cases. Retain your own human skills. If expertise really does become completely devalued, we're going to have bigger problems than you can solve on your own.
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Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend
Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team ships a product feature?